This is absolutely optional, but you could think about getting a qualified domain name to access to your home network. (a domain costs very few per year, and your can dynamically associate it with your public IP)

In many cases, when you connect from secure places (such as your company site), trying to access to a web site using its public IP will be prohibited by internals web proxies and firewalls.

By using a fqdn to associate your public IP to a real Internal domain name, your site is as official as any Internet company web site :-)

As an alternative to buy your own domain name, you can also use dynamic free domain name services such as no-ip.org, but most of company proxy will also block them.

And finally, this is just clean and beautiful ^^

In this post, i will assume for the example purpose that your domaine name is "myowndomain.com". (still the fqdn is optional)

Step 2: Manage your SSL certificate

Off course, we will want to secure our Web traffic using an SSL certificate, there is 2 ways to achieve this:

1. Generating an "auto-signed" SSL certificate

You can very easily generate an auto-signed SSL certificate, you will have exactly the same security and encrypting level than any official certificate but this certificate won't be officially recognized over the Internet.

That means that when connecting to your site, your Web browser will warn you about the impossibility to guaranty your security connecting to this site, and you have to accept this.

I personally prefer having an official SSL certificate :-)

2. Buy and generate an Officially signed SSL certificate

You can also buy an official SSL certificate for very few, in this case your browser will automatically recognize your certificate as valid and you won't get any warn.

There is some places where you can get a free official SSL certificate for personal use. (look for "startssl")